Republicans are abandoning the Trump Train, and Clinton’s rolling out the welcome mat. I hope her tent is big enough to keep John Negroponte far away from wherever the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy is being written.

The conventions are usually the most predictable part of an election year, but not this time. The outcomes of both parties’ conventions are already known, but the Republicans are nominating someone who makes a reality show of everything he touches. I’ll be watching from home, with a sick bucket nearby.

Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee after last week’s primary. Much has been made about his differences with the GOP establishment, but those differences are mostly cosmetic, particularly of the bottled tan variety.

I’m no campaign strategist, but it would probably be a good idea to take every opportunity to link Trump with the also hugely unpopular Republican brand rather than treat the two as separate entities. He is their standard-bearer after all.

Willard “Mitt” Romney is back in the news, and I’ll never pass up an opportunity to needle this man. As a freelancer, I didn’t have health insurance until he created RomneyCare. He then spent the next decade campaigning on the promise to take it away. There’s nothing more “phony” or “fraudulent” than that.

Any talk of a contested or brokered Republican convention is pure fan fiction for those establishment Republicans still in denial about the Trump candidacy; a candidacy they’ve sown for decades going back to Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

Unlike Frosty the Snowman, the Trump campaign the GOP brought to life won’t go away when the temperatures rise. We’re just over a month away from the primaries and we’ll find out if Trump’s poll numbers translate into votes and make the GOP’s decades of implicit racism explicit.